name to be inscribed on the roster of a battalion of National Guards as soon as he was settled in his new quarters, and his pay, thirty sous a day, would be enough to keep him alive.  The idea of going to the country and there leading a tranquil life, unmindful of what was happening to the country, filled him with horror; the letters even that he received from his sister Henriette, to whom he had written immediately after the armistice, annoyed him by their tone of entreaty, their ardent solicitations that he would come home to Remilly and rest.  He refused point-blank; he would go later on when the Prussians should be no longer there.

And so Maurice went on leading an idle, vagabondish sort of life, in a state of constant feverish agitation.  He had ceased to be tormented by hunger; he devoured the first white bread he got with infinite gusto; but the city was a prison still:  German guards were posted at the gates, and no one was allowed to pass them until he had been made to give an account of himself.  There had been no resumption of social life as yet; industry and trade were at a standstill; the people lived from day to day, watching to see what would happen next, doing nothing, simply vegetating in the bright sunshine of the spring that was now coming on apace.  During the siege there had been the military service to occupy men’s minds and tire their limbs, while now the entire population, isolated from all the world, had suddenly been reduced to a state of utter stagnation, mental as well as physical.  He did as others did, loitering his time away from morning till night, living in an atmosphere that for months had been vitiated by the germs arising from the half-crazed mob.  He read the newspapers and was an assiduous frequenter of public meetings, where he would often smile and shrug his shoulders at the rant and fustian of the speakers, but nevertheless would go away with the most ultra notions teeming in his brain, ready to engage in any desperate undertaking in the defense of what he considered truth and justice.  And sitting by the window in his little bedroom, and looking out over the city, he would still beguile himself with dreams of victory; would tell himself that France and the Republic might yet be saved, so long as the treaty of peace remained unsigned.

The 1st of March was the day fixed for the entrance of the Prussians into Paris, and a long-drawn howl of wrath and execration went up from every heart.  Maurice never attended a meeting now that he did not hear Thiers, the Assembly, even the men of September 4th themselves, cursed and reviled because they had not spared the great heroic city that crowning degradation.  He was himself one night aroused to such a pitch of frenzy that he took the floor and shouted that it was the duty of all Paris to go and die on the ramparts rather than suffer the entrance of a single Prussian.  It was quite natural that the spirit of insurrection should show itself thus, should bud and blossom in